


Ruptured

by slashmarks



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F, Post-Chosen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-05
Updated: 2010-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-11 12:24:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/slashmarks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Willow's spell in Chosen has lasting effects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ruptured

**Author's Note:**

> Written for angst_bingo, for the prompt headaches.

They're exactly fifteen minutes out of Sunnydale when Willow whimpers, collapses into a seat, and curls up clutching her head.

Buffy thinks of her mother and rushes to her side. Xander clutches her hand. Giles calls back in concern as he drives.

Willow sees sparkling auras for a few minutes and hears someone shrieking in her ears while her head feels like it's going to explode. Then the auras fade and the shrieking identifies itself as belonging to Andrew.

"It's fine, guys," she says. "I'm not hurt. Just a migraine. Buffy, you're bleeding all over the seat, where's the first aid kit?"

*

The next time is a few days later. They've checked into a motel in Nevada, near Las Vegas but not close enough to make it expensive. They have taken up all the rooms on one side of the hotel, and the boy at the desk looked kind of overwhelmed when they asked for ten rooms with twin beds.

Willow is swiping her card key to room she's sharing with Buffy when – oh goddess – her head is exploding and the scrolling numbers are floating in mid air and swirling and everything is going red—

"Willow!" Buffy shouts and catches her. She stands slowly and swipes the card again.

*

When she collapses in the swimming pool of a four star hotel in Kentucky and almost drowns, Giles overrules her and calls Dawn and her laptop to the local library to help him research.

They come back in a few hours with the verdict. Willow is lying in bed with Kennedy threatening to sit on her if she gets up and feeding her chocolate when they tell her that it's a result of the spell she cast on the Slayers.

It was too much. A human isn't meant to bear that kind of power. Maybe, Giles says, if she had been a Potential herself, it would have worked – but she wasn't. The power ruptured something in her brain.

Willow has less than six months to live. Eight if she's very, very lucky and doesn't stress her brain out with magic.

Giles and Dawn leave the room and she lies back, closes her eyes and tries to make herself believe it's true. She can't quite, but Kennedy is crying and holding her hand and Willow has a dull, half-real thought that it isn't fair. She had just started wanting to live again, after Tara, and now she can't.

Then she opens her eyes, discovers Kennedy has stolen the last chocolate bar, and steals half of it.

She isn't dying. They'll come up with something. They always have.

*

But they try and try and there's nothing. If this was a spell, a curse, some kind of demon – but it isn't. It's plain old breakdown of her cells, even if she got it through magic. Dawn pulls Willow into a motel lobby at three AM to look at healing spells online, but they're all too close to dark magic. Willow doesn't want to save herself by killing everyone around her.

She almost reconsiders in another three weeks, when she's lying down, awkwardly curled on the sticky plastic seat covers. There's a sheet draped over the seat in front of her and the one she's leaning against to give her some semblance of privacy, and Kennedy's reading to her from outside it with her head and the book stuck inside.

It's a romance book, the kind of thing Kennedy hates, but Willow needs the comfort of dashing princesses saving other princesses. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, sparklers invade her vision and Kennedy's voice is drowned out by a load humming.

*

Another month and Willow can't stay on the bus anymore – the jarring of the road makes her head pound worse than ever, she can't walk without help and she has constant nosebleeds. Blood comes out of her throat when she coughs and her eyes when she cries. Everything is stained red.

She and Kennedy rent an apartment in some midsized city in the northeast. Kennedy slays and teaches a self defense course to women and Willow lies in bed all day and listens to soft music when she can stand it.

Kennedy still reads to her in the evenings, but Willow's not up to sex.

*

She can't remember when she entered the hospital. Kennedy comes a lot and cries, and it's sad. Willow holds her hands and kisses her and listens to the reading.

The hospital food is revolting, but that's okay, because she almost never has enough energy left to eat. She emerges from her room once a day in her wheel chair, goes down to the courtyard and breathes in the air. Meditation – she has trouble focusing on it now, but she can do at least a few minutes a day. Admitting she can't even meditate is giving up.

She can't die yet. She _can't_. Buffy and Xander and Giles are in Europe and the new Slayers are scattered across the world and the Council is being reformed and they need her.

It doesn't matter. Willow dies five minutes before Kennedy's daily visit, two days before Buffy should have arrived from Europe to see her best friend.


End file.
